REAL racism in action: British deny Iroquois Nation (the inventors of La Crosse) entry for tournament in UK

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re:

by 11_11

Jul. 18, 2010 10:45 am

WESTBURY, N.Y. — The 23 players on the Iroquois national lacrosse team expected to spend this week vying for a world championship.

Instead, they spent Friday night divvying up their gear in the driveway outside a Hilton hotel here, having officially declared defeat in their weeklong dispute with the British government over whether they should be allowed to travel using their tribal passports.

“I felt it was coming, but I didn’t want to believe it until I actually heard it,” said Ron Cogan, 31, who played defense for the team.

The team, known as the Nationals, forfeited its first game Thursday night against England. Unless the team departed for the tournament by Friday evening, it would have had no choice but to forfeit its next game, scheduled for Saturday afternoon against Japan.

[..]

The dispute has superseded lacrosse, prompting diplomatic tap-dancing abroad and reigniting in the United States a centuries-old debate over the s[b]overeignty of American Indian nations[/b]. The Iroquois refused to accept United States passports, saying they did not want to travel to an international competition on what they consider to be a foreign nation’s passport.

The British government first objected to the team’s travel plans last week, when it said the Iroquois players would not be allowed to travel to the tournament in Manchester, England, unless the United States vouched for their tribal passports and guaranteed the team would be allowed to re-enter the country.

The United States refused to do so until Wednesday, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton granted the team a one-time waiver to travel without United States passports.

But later Wednesday, British officials informed the team it would not receive visas after all, dealing a blow to the team’s hopes and angering several lawmakers who had lobbied on the team’s behalf. Representative Dan Maffei, Democrat of New York, called the situation an “international embarrassment” and went so far as to question England’s ability to host the 2012 Olympics.

American diplomats discussed the case with their British counterparts on Wednesday and Thursday, but the State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley signaled Friday that the team was out of luck.

“From our standpoint, we’ve done what we can do,” Crowley told reporters in Washington. “It would appear to us at this point that the U.K. has made their final determination.”

The British government indicated that was the case. A spokeswoman for the United Kingdom Border Agency said British officials had not changed their position.

That broader issue of the validity of tribal passports — which experts in American Indian law say have been allowed for international travel for several decades, even if the letter of the law forbids them to be used as replacements for United States passports — remains unresolved.

[..]

Discussing their saga had been all the team had been able to do the past few days while it remained marooned, forbidden from flying to the tournament because British officials would not accept its tribal documents in lieu of American or Canadian passports because of security concerns. The Iroquois passports are partly handwritten and lack the holograms and other technological features that guard against forgeries.

Jefferson Keel, the lieutenant governor of the Chickasaw Nation and the National Congress’s president, said in a telephone interview that the fight over the passports ws indicative of skepticism in some parts of the world about the [b]sovereignty of Indian nations[/b].

[..]

“We fought a battle that was bigger than lacrosse,” said Marty Ward, a 25-year-old goalie. “It brought indigenous people back to the forefront. It let everyone know that we’re still here — we haven’t gone anywhere.”

What this is about is native people who refuse to be absorbed into the British created New World Order control mechanism. The British call all indigenous people "nativists", which they mean as a slur, as though those who insist on their own sovereignty are the racists when, in fact, they have remained steadfast in their principal that they have a right to self determination and self government.